Ah, you can trust a truly shitty day to drive you back to the comfort and warmth of the internet. I guess once an addict, always an addict.
I just stuck ‘why blog’ into Google and it came up with William Gibson’s blog, notable because only today did I see Gibson’s name mentioned in Neil Gaiman’s blog. I’d never heard of Gibson before (oh, mea culpa, I’m so uninformed), so I was tempted enough by this coincidence to check it out. It makes good reading. I think his blog might even become a daily destination for me.
I also found Joho the blog, which endeared itself to me immediately upon the discovery of this passage, actually quoted from Jonathan Peterson. (I can’t find the exact words myself, but they are allegedly in there somewhere.)

[there are] tremendous isolationist pressures on individuals, anything that can lessen those pressures by enabling real, emotional, human, re-connection will thrive.

Hey, now I don’t feel so bad about running back to Sweet Addy at the first sign of stress.

My head is a seething morass of thoughts today, each one writhing against the next like a ball of herring desperately trying to escape the tuna fish herding them up to the surface of the sea to ensure that each and every one becomes lunch.
I’m going cold turkey. That’s it. My addiction (or should that be, addyction) to Sweet Addy and MSN has got way too out of hand, and I appear to be absolutely incapable of simply cutting back. It’s like that idea that you can quit smoking or drinking by ‘just cutting down’ – it’s all very well in theory but in practice it’s very difficult to draw the line between ‘enough’ and ‘too much’.
So it is with my pals online – there’s no such thing as a ‘quick chat’ online. I have been known in recent days to have MSN conversations that have gone on for six or eight hours. Admittedly MSN chats tend to be a lot slower than normal ones – we probably could have said the same in half an hour on the phone. But I can touch type, which means that the limiting factor in the speed of the conversation is the typing speed of the other party. If they type slowly, then I can pretend to myself that I’m getting work done in between my contributions. If they type as fast as I do, then that pretence becomes less and less believable.
I’ve been online since 1994, one way or another. I remember when Yahoo chat was full of adults discussing books and literature, rather than 13 year olds pretending to cyber. I remember when a 28k connection seemed to be going like shit off a stick. I remember when web sites never had graphics.
I’ve used the internet for communication, research, work and fun for eight or nine years. I’ve depended on it for work for the last five. But this is the worst my addiction has become, because only now is it interfering with my life in a negative way (i.e. I’m playing online when I should be working). The internet has variously been my mentor, my saviour and my reliable ol’ mate throughout that time, but now it’s really doing my head in.
Faced with this question now, of whether I really am an internet addict, I did what any sensible person would do. I went to Google and searched for information. (Strike one…)
This means that I’m not in bed when told myself I would be (strike two…), and that my intention to get an early night so that I could get an early morning so that I can catch up on all the things that I should have done today but didn’t do because I was too busy chatting to my Australian friends has really bitten the dust. (Strike two-and-a-half…)
It’s clear that the internet is not addictive in the way that, say, heroin is addictive. If it is addictive, then it’s a behavioural addiction, not physiological, but many psychologists just don’t believe it’s real at all. But if in fact addicts “use the Internet excessively as a medium to fuel other addictions… The Internet is just the place where they engage in their behaviour” (Griffths, 2000), then what the hell am I addicted to? Talking?
Actually, that’s not so far from the truth really. I’m a compulsive communicator. I’m afraid that I have the confessional gene, and talking is something I’m rather well known for in the real world. Or should I say, talking too much. But you know, that’s not my fault – if you’d been brought up with my Mum you’d also have learnt that the only way to say everything you needed to say is to not draw breath between paragraphs. And never pause. A pause in our household was always fatal.
It’s a miracle that I ever learnt to punctuate.
However, much of the stuff on internet addiction that I’ve been reading whilst writing this blog seems to be somewhat concerned with cybering, rather than taking an overall look at how excessive internet usage affects people’s lives. Yet there’s a lot more to internet usage than cybering.
And this brings me onto a tangential bugbear that I can’t let pass.
What is wrong with the good old fashioned epistolary relationship, as was once common, facilitated by email and MSN? Huh? Not every friendship or relationship formed online is fake, shallow and lacking in merit. I met a couple of my very dear friends online and our relationships offline are no different to the ones we have online. I also know many couples who have met online and are living perfectly well together offline.
Yet so many people who have no experience of what could tongue-twistingly be called an e-epistolary relationship will immediately dismiss them as ‘unreal’, as if the internet itself is in some way fake. It’s not. There are real people out there, and they are no more likely to be a mad axe murderer than any guy who’s ever chatted me up in a pub. In fact, I would rather get to know someone slowly over a number of months via the internet than get utterly shitfaced in some skanky London bar and hope that my judgement’s not so clouded that I’ll have to gnaw my own arm off in the morning in order to effect an escape. (Don’t laugh. I’m typing one-handed right now, you know.)
Anyway, back to the point. Internet addiction. I’m not going to list the various signs and signals listed on the sites I’ve looked at, nor am I going to link to them, mainly because I happen to tick ‘yes’ to a rather scary proportion of them. (Secrecy regarding online activities? Strike two-and-three-quarters…)
But I have concluded that I’m not actually addicted. Not really. I just need a break and to concentrate on the important things in life, like making sure my business flourishes. (Or at least goes out with a flourish, if nothing else…)
Denial? Strike three! You’re out!

I would like to know if anyone’s got a formula for calculating the Doppler shift on fast receding deadlines. I’m pretty sure that there must be one, as you can hear that kinda funny pitch-shifting whining sound they make as they go past.
Equally, there must be a formula for the apparent speed with which holidays fail to approach.
Yesterday, I booked a return ticket to San Francisco (a place that I frequently have difficulty spelling) for July. Now, the momentousness of this event is something which I don’t think many people reading this will be able to appreciate. This isn’t just a holiday. This isn’t just an opportunity to go to new places, meet up with new people and generally have a spiffing good time. This isn’t just a chance to get away from the dreariness of Reading, or for two weeks to put aside my stresses and worries about my beautiful business.
No.
This is much, much more important than that.
This is my first holiday, my first actual leaving the country holiday involving fun and relaxing and sunshine and generally having a good time, for some 13 years. Yup. Thirteen. Count ‘em. Last time I went a-gallivanting was in 1990 when I spent a deliriously fabulous nine months in Australia, delighting in the discovery that one could earn money and then actually spend it!!
When I was up at the Groucho Club in March for the St David’s Day SWS party, I was accused by a complete stranger of being a workaholic, a charge I hotly (but somewhat ineffectively) denied. However, in having to defend myself against these charges I was forced to examine exactly why I haven’t been on holiday for 13 years. I mean, it’s not like my nose has been chained to its inner grindstone for all that time.
Strictly speaking, I actually have had holidays, i.e. I’ve had time off work. (When I’ve had that kind of work, that is. Being self-unemployed as I have been for the last six years does not really lend itself to holidays, just periods of inactivity and brokeness followed by flurries of work and the paying off of the credit cards you lived off when you were broke. My life has been one constant cashflow crisis – I haven’t had any, and it hasn’t.) I just seem to have spent that time off either faffing about my house/flat/small cardboard box, or going back to Dorset and putting in kitchens. Or bathrooms. Or windows.
I suppose I could easily have just booked myself a holiday, but I’ve always found other things to spend my money on. New computers. New guitars. New amps. More new guitars. Another new amp…
I see pattern emerging there.
Thing is, it’s not like I’m exactly flush with cash right now. In fact, I’m contemplating flogging some of the spare guitars and amps that I have littered around the place as they do nothing bit sit about and gather dust. Two of the basses I can’t play because they’re too heavy – the Precision and the Aria. The Hohner acoustic I can’t play because it’s right-handed and I play left-handed these days. The Bass State B65 I no longer use as I don’t play in a band any more and, frankly, I can’t see myself playing in a band again any time soon. So I may as well flog them and, given the state of my bank account, the sooner the better.
Anyway, so yes, holidays. And the speed with which they fail to approach. I remember that only a week ago, my holiday was 82 days away. Now it’s… :consults calendar: 75 days away. Yet it doesn’t appear to be appreciably closer. I mean, a whole week went past and nothing happened.
It’s like standing on the platform at Reading station waiting for the next fast to London, and you can see the headlights in the distance, but you stand and stare and stand and stare and they don’t get any bigger and so you stand and stare for a bit longer.
Then they tell you that there’s a signal failure outside the station and that you’ll have to wait at least another half an hour, and you realise that the reason that the train never got any bigger was because it was stopped.
I hope I don’t have that problem with my holiday. With any luck, it will be just like those spanky new Virgin trains. You can hear the track singing with anticipation, making that whispery metallic whipping sound as the train gets closer and you look up and suddenly what was only moments ago a little red speck in the distance is pulling in at the platform in front of you, ready to whisk you off to somewhere new and exciting.
Or Crewe.
Hopefully, though, my holiday will have a bit more legroom.

Here's that Organica page that wasn't working the other day. I notice that neither Organica nor Ecosystems are 100% accurate, though. I actually have four links into this blog, not three. And when you're talking about such small numbers, a difference of one is important!

I've just had a bit of an influx of emails after PopBitch included the CMC swearing in Welsh cheat sheet in its weekly email. If you get it, scroll right down to the very, very bottom to find:

Still bored?
Learn how to swear in Welsh:
http://www.clwbmalucachu.co.uk/cheat/cheat_swearing.htm

Fame! Fame at last! Ffycin ffantastig! Ah, I feel like all these years of effort and slogging away over a hot dictionary are finally paying off.
Hmm… spose I better subscribe to PopBitch now really, hadn't I?

Whilst looking for something completely different the other night, I came across a couple of sites that provide link stats for blogs. Ecosystems gives lists of the links out of and into Choc’n’Vodka, but picks up only the menu links. Organica (which today fails to work, hence no link) on the other hand appears to be a bit more comprehensive, picking up all the links in all of the archives for its outgoing list.
Whilst the concept of knowing who has linked to me is great, the reality of it is a bit pathetic really. Both links into Choc’n’Vodka are from people I know – so it seems I shall remain an undiscovered blogging phenomenon for a while yet.
Whilst shuffling though the bevvie of links that those two sites threw up, I also found BlogStreet Visual Neighbourhood, which basically finds blogs it thinks are similar to yours and lays them out in a sort of mindmap. A lot of the blogs were obvious – Bratiaith and Rwdls Nwdls, for example, I already know about and link to, if only cos they’re Welsh. But I did find #!/user/bin/girl and, via that, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, both of which were amusing diversions from this afternoon’s tasks at hand.
One thing I would like to know, though, is how many people read this blog. I know some of my friends do, because occasionally I’ll start some witty and erudite comment only for them to say ‘Yes, I read that on your blog’. So far so good – the people I’m writing for are reading and that makes me a happy bunny.
But I have suspected for sometime that the number of people who actually read blogs is considerably less the number of people writing them. Come on, we’ve all gone to Weblogs.com or somesuch, just to check if we’re on the list, but how many of those blogs do we actually read? Well I’m way too busy simultaneously carrying out three conversations on MSN, slapping scores of witty ripostes up on Sweet Addy in order to keep my postcount healthy, and replying to emails to do any work, let alone read any blogs.
My suspicion that blog readers are few and far between seemed to be confirmed when I was skimming this article on The Register. Although it’s actually about the Googlewashing of the phrase ‘secondary superpower’ (no, I didn’t know about Googlewashing either, but I’ll take The Register’s word for it), one bit stood out:

Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is “so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.”

Further exploration of Pew Research Center’s latest research fails to throw up an actual figure for the number of blog users, other than “4% of online Americans report going to blogs for information and opinions”. A quick bit of maths based on PRC’s assertion that there are 116 million Americans online indicates 4.6 million Americans ‘use’ blogs (there’s no distinction made between reading and writing).
This leaves me wondering. 4.6 million blog users in American alone isn’t exactly a small number of people, no matter how statistically insignificant it might be in the grand scheme of things. So does this mean that there are 4.6 million blogs in America? (Cue: sudden and unexplained Kim Wilde flashback.) Maybe I’m wrong in my assumption that no one reads blogs. Maybe that’s just me. After all, I’m too lazy to learn the word for ‘lazy’ in Welsh.
Anyway, this leaves me at the end here trying to figure out what on earth my point was in all that. I think it’s got something to do with the words ‘million’ and ‘two’ and the disparity between them. Come on guys, link to me!

Where are we? Oh yes, Tuesday. That’s right. I’m all kinda thrown because Sunday, usually a day of surreptitious shopping and pretending to be working, miraculously turned into a day of rest. Yes, that’s right, sitting down somewhere that was not in front of a computer.
By the time Fflwff had dragged me out of bed, the electricity had gone off, and it didn’t come back again until 7pm. Initially, I was at a loss. What would I do? I’d have a nice shower… Oh no, can’t. Um, OK, bath instead. Then I thought I’d kill some time until I could get on the internet by doing something constructive, like ironing. Oh, wait, that’s out too. Well, I really do need to dyson the flat… OK, starting to see a pattern here.
I must admit, I had started to feel a bit twitchy by lunchtime, and actually ended up leaving the house and going to Tescos, where they had electricity but no internet. I had hoped that this masterstroke of timekilling strategy would end with me returning home, laden with goodies, only to find the electricity back and my computer ready and waiting to go online.
It didn’t.
So I faffed.
I rang people I haven’t spoken to in years.
I rang people I’d spoken to last week.
I rediscovered the lost art of reading, devouring most of the New Scientist in one hit. (It lands on my mat every Thursday, and I never have time to read it all. Plus I have several months worth of Scientific American still untouched by human hands).
I fed the cat. Several times. I played with the cat. I let the cat out. I let the cat back in again.
I stared at the heaps of paperwork on my desk and contemplated sorting them out, but found that particular activity quite easy to resist.
I opened the front door and wandered round the garden, killing approximately 28 seconds. (It’s a small garden.)
I flicked through the guide book to South Australia that I bought on Saturday.
I kicked myself for going into town to buy a guide book to South Australia on Saturday instead working because I had assumed I could do it on Sunday.
I kept thinking, oh, well, spare time, I’ll just put the TV on…
The silence was positively deafening.
Obviously I wasn’t the only one faffing, as mid-afternoon, two fire engines came screaming into the close, only to park up and sit bemusedly for five minutes before screaming off into the far distance again. I suspect little Johnny downstream was bored and thought that calling 999 would be a fun jape.
Then… suddenly and without warning, the lounge light came on at about 6.30pm and scared the bejeesus out of me. I’m not quite sure about the mechanism for that – how can something you’re expecting to happen any minute still make you jump? I get that with phone calls, when you ring someone up and they do the ‘Oh, I’ll call you back in a moment’ thing and you put the phone down and a few moments later they ring back and I leap out of my chair like some evil dead zombie dripping blood and gore has just materialised in front of me.
Um, anyway, yes, the lights came back on. And then went off again. And came back on again… For about 10 minutes. I think someone was trying to communicate something really very important in Morse, but unfortunately the only Morse I have is the beebs and bips at the beginning of Barrington Pheloung’s Inspector Morse theme tune, which I could sing to you but not translate.
I prefer to think that it was Douglas Adams telling me that he was right about 42, and forget about the towels.
The thing that surprised me though, apart from the sudden brightness, was how noisy my house is. My cordless phone was bleating like an orphaned lamb, the microwave tooted, the fridge and freezer started humming, the thermostat was clicking like an old granny going for the World Speed Knitting record and the video started whirring like, well a whirry thing.
I think I preferred it when it was quiet.
So, I had my internet and email back, the thing I’d been craving all day, the thing whose absence had caused me jitters and chronic withdrawal anxiety, and guess what? No emails. No private messages. And sweet fanny adams in terms of anything interesting online whatsoever. All that waiting for precisely nothing.
When they launch the Twelve Steps for Internet Dependency, I’m gonna be there. But don't worry. I'll blog about it.

These are some of the first coherent thoughts to form in my head all day which don’t involve the phrases ‘but it hurts’ or ‘am I going to throw up?’. I spent most of the morning holding my head on with one hand as my migraine blossomed. I’m lucky, I only get them about once or twice a year and usually they don’t involve pain and vomiting – they’re what are called ‘aura only’ migraines, i.e. I just go blind for an hour or so, and then it all clears up and goes away.
Today, for some reason, my migraine started in my right eye (usually it’s my left) and then the pain kinda roved across my face like a tribe of nomads, then up over the left-hand part of my head which I had to then cling on to in order to prevent it from dropping off. I never can figure out why I have to do this, but every time I get a bad headache, I just have to clutch at my head like a crone going after a rat.
After several hours of laying a-bed and not vomiting (quite an achievement, I felt), I finally managed to get one of my icepacks and apply it appropriately.
Which always begs the question – which part of the body is it, exactly, for which these icepacks are designed? They’re long, they’re flat and they don’t bend well. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m mainly built of curves – flat planes are few and far between on me, especially in the head/neck/shoulder area to which these ice pack are usually applied.
Why not make these things curvy and flexible? In fact, why not make them head-shaped or scarf-ishly bendable? That way I would be saved from a) having to wrap the icepack in a thin towel (ok, a teatowel) in order to tie it round my neck or b) trying to sit bolt upright and balancing the thing on my head. To make them as hats, or scarves, would be much more user friendly.
My other quibble is the ignorance of certain doctors as regards the medical issues surrounding migraines. One in ten people get migraines. That’s 10% of the population. That’s six million people, for any doctors reading this who are too stupid to add up.
That’s a lot of people.
Last November I had a rough weekend which featured two migraines and the arrival of a new symptom for me – my skin went numb. Naturally, not being then as well read about migraines as I am now, I decided it would be wise to get it checked out as it’s not every day I lose feeling in my skin. I was struck, however, by the total absence of knowledge displayed by my supposedly well informed doctor. Our conversation went something like:
“I had two migraines over the weekend.”
“Huh.”
“Well, I don’t normally get two together.”
“Huh.”
“They were just aura migraines though, but now I can’t feel my face properly.”
“Huh?”
“Or my arms, or my legs. Or, in fact, any bit of me.”
“Huh.”
“Although there is a sort of strange tingliness to the numbness.”
“Huh.”
“So…”
“Well, if it doesn’t clear up in a week, come back to me.”
And this is what I pay my taxes for? So some jumped-up arrogant jerk can patronise me and fob me off with some pointless platitude in order to cover up her own ignorance? I mean, it’s not like I’m expecting her to wave a magic wand and cure me, but a bit of info would be nice. Instead, I went home and looked it up on the internet, which is what I should have done in the first place, and found out that such symptoms can occur, and are relatively normal and will in fact go away eventually (5 days in my case).
The quack could have told me that though, but she didn’t know. Hell, from the expression on her face it was perfectly clear she had no idea what ‘aura’ was either (that’s the visual disturbances you get as a migraine starts – the flashing lights etc. that essentially stop you seeing a damn thing).
But I do believe that everyone, especially that particular doctor, should have at least one storming migraine, so that they can understand what they are like and how crippling they can be. I would dearly like for her to have one like my first, when I was sixteen. One that involves going almost completely blind, not being able to see your hand in front of your face, not being able to walk through your house because you keep bumping into things that you can’t see. One that involves vomiting chocolate cake down the stairs in a somewhat unpleasant waterfall (vomitfall?), retching so hard that your eyes go black with the prickling bruises of broken blood vessels. One that involves curling up foetally under the duvet in a blacked-out room, unable to cry with pain because there’s too much of it, but able, just, to whimper plaintively “Bring me some painkillers.”
To which I would, of course, reply: “Huh?”
Anyway, that shagged my whole day really. So tomorrow is catch-up day. It would be nice to have a good clean start – put this whole week behind me. Not that nice things haven’t happened this week – I have had a few particularly pleasant experiences such as a phone call to Australia that I shall be grinning about for weeks to come yet. But it has been a frustrating week full of not really getting down to work in any serious manner, not really making the progress I would have liked to have made considering the amount of work to be done.
So I think I might redesignate today the official end of the week, which means that Saturday is now essentially Monday so if I work tomorrow I’ll have Tuesday off which will be Sunday and then next weekend start with Saturday on Thursday unfortunately meaning that I will need Monday and Tuesday off on Saturday and Sunday so I can have the weekend free to go to Dorset.
Makes perfect sense to me.

I got side-tracked this evening. I was going to write a long and impressive rant about why I despise the reprehensible stealth tax that is the national lottery. Instead, I'm going to bring you Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863) (via Neil Gaiman's blog. Again. See, I don't have time to surf much these days!), and leave it pretty much at that I think. Maybe tomorrow…

I've just realised that I've been sitting at this computer solidly for twelve hours now. No wonder I feel like seven shades of shite.
I really don't know what came over me this morning, but at 5.50am I woke up. Not in that 'ooh, I'll just turn over and go back to sleep’ way, but in that kind of over-alert, over-awake way where after a few minutes of trying to get back to sleep you realise the futility of it all, and just get up. You know how it is, when the sunlight’s seeped through your skull and your pineal gland is screaming for breakfast.
So I got up and did 45 mins of Pilates which resulted in a strained muscle (that’s good! I wasn’t aware I had any!) and a feeling of virtuousness that lasted till, oh, as soon as I turned MSN on at about 12.30.
Anyway, I was surfing by 6.45am, and working by 7.45am. And I’m really not sure why…
Now then… where's that canopic jar?

Well, my work ethic has come back to haunt me. Here I am, sitting in my parents’ lounge, looking out on a gloriously sunny spring afternoon, with a heap of work to do (despite the fact that it’s a bank holiday and frankly I shouldn’t be doing anything) but absolutely no inclination to do it at all. I made a half hearted start on the indexing of the Get Fluent worksheets so far, then went for a walk round the garden instead.
As usual, Fflwff has located the highest defensible position in the house – on top of the wardrobe in the spare room – and is ready to see off all comers. In practice, this usually just means me. Cleo and Rossy, my parents' cats, never actually look up so the chances are that the entire weekend will pass without them realising that Fflwff is even here. I’ll feed her on top of the wardrobe, and she’ll pop down in the middle of the night to make use of the kitty litter, and then it’ll be time to go home.*
Cleo, however, is treating me with a great deal of suspicion, as she always does. We have already played games of Cat and Human, which is like Cat and Mouse except the aim is for the Human to hug the Cat, despite the Cat’s wish to be left alone to watch with interest the small brown birds frequenting the all-you-can-eat peanut buffet. I got my hug, but at the price of two small puncture wounds and a very pissed-off cat.
Latest web thing is the Honda ‘Cog’ advert, (via Neil Gaiman's blog) which was shot in one go, on the 606th take. There’s been much discussion about how they managed it on SA. Consensus is (i.e. my dad said) that the bit with the wheels going up the slope was done using weights and small motors within the wheel. Still however it was done, it’s viral marketing at it’s best. (Although I hasten to add that this ad had done nothing to persuade me to buy a car, let a lone a Honda. Frankly, I’m still far too terrified of driving to even think about buying a car.)
*Due to Fflwff's last moment relocation to the office and the fact that whenever possible Cleo prefers to hide under the desk that Fflwff likes to sit on, it has now become abundantly clear that Cleo and Fflwff are very much aware of each other's presence. In fact, I was starting to worry that Fflwff had not only sprung a leak but was in danger of depressurising completely, the amount of hissing she was doing.
[Ed. 11 Jun 04: Shit. A post about cats. Shoot me now, please, for my own sake...]

oh dear it seems that
this haiku thing is catching
oh, five seven five
sweet addyct am i
i talked crap all afternoon
both there and on chat
the fiery sun sets
but i must apply myself
always catching up

Ever tried writing in Welsh after nothing more than half a panini for lunch and far too many Pimms? It gets really tricky after a while. My ‘rhag ofn’s were getting all confused with my ‘rhagor’s. Or maybe it’s just me. Feck, that’s what my translator is for, to fix my typos.
Still, today has been a good day, as birthdays go. People didn’t forget, which is always nice. I had a phone call from my parents who are off gallivanting in Lanzarote. I thought they might call, but they caught me off guard by doing it twelve hours earlier than I expected. Rotters.
I also got four of the CDs I’ve been craving ownership of
- Aqualung’s Aqualung: Matt Hales’s sweet heartbroken voice could make an angel weep
- The Libertines’ Up the Bracket: featuring the best ‘fuck ‘em’ in modern music.
- The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World: James Mercer’s surreal lyrics and pop sensibilities make this a truly wondrous album
- Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown: to say that Hot Hot Heat are Very Very Good, is somewhat of an understatement
I am also now the very proud and excited owner of the Pleasantville DVD. Number Six! Oh yes!! Tonight, once I’ve had my gourmet pasta and the first strawberries and clotted cream of the year, I shall rearrange my furniture in that ritualistic manner to which I have become accustomed, and I shall allow myself to be totally spirited away. I read the script a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been yearning to see the flick ever since. It was a great read – just came to life immediately in my head as I read, in stark contrast to, say, The Ice Storm at the end of which I was left thinking ‘Eh?’.
It’s been unseasonably hot today as well, and I feel with the very moment of my birth rapidly approaching (about 10pm-ish, apparently) that this coming year will be one of huge opportunities, including the chance to tip my life upside down, shake it a bit, and see what interesting things fall out. I haven’t done that for a while, and a birthday is a good opportunity being, as it is, the anniversary of one’s very first Big Shake Up.
This day 32 years ago, in The Firs Maternity Home in Bournemouth, the midwife wrapped a squalling me in a blanket, handed me to my mother and said, ‘Mrs Charman, a beautiful baby girl’. To which my mother replied, ‘Are you sure?’.
Apparently, they’d been expecting a boy, as boys ‘run in the family’. True enough, my brother’s a boy, and so’s my dad. Anyway, they were going to call me Mark, and they had boy’s clothing ready for me, so when I turned up, three weeks early and the wrong gender, my dad had to make a dash for the shops to buy something pink.
Pity they didn’t know at that time that I hate pink. But then, I didn’t know at that time either, so I guess it was a moot point.
Birthdays are good for nice surprises. And I’ve had several today, one of which was quite astonishing. My friend Kate and I had been lamenting only this afternoon about the fact that neither of us had heard in a long time from our American friend JD in a year or more. And what should pop up in my inbox this afternoon but an email from the very same! How’s that for coincidence?
Anyway… I think may be rambling a little, and it’s time for my weekly phone call to Nic so that I can practise my spoken Welsh, so I shall post this, and let you go. But not before I say thank you for the happy birthday to everyone who emailed, PMd, posted and sent me stuff. You’re all adorable!

Today has been one of those days. I woke at 12.45am with this amazingly loud ringing in my left ear, as if a tuning fork had suddenly materialised in my Eustachian tube. Two hours of laying there trying to back to sleep later and I figured out that I may as well get up and do something useful. So I spent a happy hour or so typesetting until my eyelids were resting on the keyboard. I got back to bed about 3.45am ish.
Hence today has been a vacant day. Mondays are bad at the best of times, just because of the way my week works. Mondays I write the Welsh language worksheet that’s to go out the following week to Get Fluent! subscribers. Sometimes they come out easily, sometimes I find that I would rather be retching my guts up into toilet bowl than be sat in front of this computer writing grammar exercises and reading comprehensions.
Today, I would rather have gnawed my own leg off than try to tackle writing a worksheet. I think I actually spent more time reading Neil Gaiman’s blog and playing on Sweet Addy than I did doing any actual work. I think I got maybe a third of the worksheet done, which pisses me off mightily, because I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday working in order that today I might gain some ground and therefore be able to take tomorrow off. Well, I shouldn’t have bothered because any time I made up yesterday I lost today.
Which means tomorrow morning, the first thing I have to do, after I’ve opened the alluringly mysterious CD-sized packages that have lit upon my doormat over the last few days, is finish that damn worksheet.
Arse.
/rant

Paul Carr on the demise of Salon.com, from The Guardian Online:
“I feel really sorry for anyone trying to raise funds to launch a subscription-based website in the current climate – it would be easier to get funding for a new pan-European fashion retail brand led by two Swedish ex-models.”
Hah. Don't I know it. I'm small (make that 'microscopic') fry compared to Salon, but what I could do with a tiny, weeny fraction of the 50 million quid they've pissed up the wall… it makes me spit feathers. Trying to raise money for an internet business, even with a proven business model and a solid business plan, in the current climate is like trying to teach Bush Jr to read – a slow painful process with no guarantee of success no matter how much hard work you put in. The words 'Internet' and 'start-up' are dirty, dirty words still, and bank managers everywhere hide under their desks in terror the minute they hear them.
Thing is, not every internet-based business haemorrhages money out of every orifice. Some of us manage to keep our costs down by working our arses off every hour of the day, and (as was the case at 3am this morning) several hours of the night too. We don't have big offices, lots of staff and long lunches. In fact, we're lucky if we get lunch at all. Any business that involves the web gets tarred with the Boo brush, and I fear it's gonna be a long time before that changes, but I do take heart from the likes of Pyra, whose long term hard work seems to be finally paying dividends.
Meantime, I'll soon either be another internet bankrupt, or (and this is my preferred route) I'll find someone somewhere who's interested in stumping up a measley £10k to allow me to expand my business. Either way, I don't anticipate an easy ride.

I've just got off the phone to my friend Natalie in Portland Oregon who, I was reminded, once gave a small tin-foil statuette of the god Thoth to Neil Gaiman. This fact has always made me slightly envious as I have never given anything to Neil Gaiman. I have a signed copy of Mr Punch, though, and the memory of a day some time in the mid 90s when my friend Kathleen, a multi-lingual American with whom I worked, went for lunch with Neil and artist Dave McKean. Another green moment.
So I looked Neil up on the net and found his blog. It’s kind of strange to think of Neil blogging, because for some reason one expects a successful author to do anything else in his spare time but write. However, I’m glad that he does, because this is going to be another one of my daily destinations and high on my list of displacement activities.
How generous the world is when it comes to providing me with ways to put off til next week tasks which, otherwise, I’d only be able to put off til tomorrow.

It’s Sunday, and if I had an ounce of sense, which I will be the first to admit I do not, I would have spent the day chilling out, maybe going to Tescos, and possibly slipping quietly into a pleasant coma in front of the TV. But, being stupid, I didn’t. I intended to spend the day working so that I can have a guilt-free Tuesday afternoon off to go up to London and acknowledge (you don’t really ‘celebrate’ much after 31) my birthday.
In actual fact, I spent an enjoyable several hours trying to help a friend of mine figure out how to get Soulseek working properly on a Mac. Trouble is, there’s a bit of a communications hitch in trying to give a Maccite advice when you are, however unwillingly, a PCite:
‘Ok, so now you right-click on the user’s name… What do you mean you only have one button on your mouse?’
Eventually, I got to see a screenshot of said Mac version of the Slsk user interface. And promptly gave up. Even someone of my prodigious assumption-making abilities can’t fathom a program from one screenshot alone. I did try to find a Mac Slsk faq online to assist in the fathoming process, but they all seemed to be in German.
Other displacement activities indulged in today included burning CDs of mp3s for various friends of mine to whom I have promised an insight into my musical taste. (More fool them for accepting.) Now, this whole mp3 thing is great, imo. I get to road test music before I buy it, hell, sometimes before it even comes out.
As the season for new releases descends swiftly upon us, I have found that I will not be purchasing The White Stripes’ Elephant, no matter how hard they hype it, but I shall be buying Blur’s Think Tank, despite the fact that I was fully prepared to hate everything they ever released ever again after they fired Graham Coxon.
I am also now desperate to find the money to buy Tom McRae’s Just Like Blood, Athlete’s Vehicles and Animals, Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up The Breakdown, The Dandy’s Warhols’ Welcome to the Monkey House, Turin Brakes’ Ether Song, and several rather marvellous recordings by bands/artists who will never get airplay on XFM (Jeff Hanson, Joseph Arthur, The Shins) but who were justly recommended to me by friends.
[Hint: if you haven’t bought me something for my birthday yet, please refer to the above list.]
If you were to believe the music industry (although why would you believe an industry willing to sell its granny into slavery for a quick buck?) you would assume that having downloaded these mp3s, I’m now happy with my music and will never again spend a single penny on tangible musical assets.
How wrong can you be? Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries, but I have to own the things I like. I don’t like renting movies if I can buy the DVD instead.
[Second birthday hint: Stargate Ultimate, My Own Private Idaho, Donnie Darko, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow… I could go on, but that’s enough for the moment.]
Instead of being the happy punter whose pfenigs are safe in her purse, the ability to download mp3s has resulted in me craving the ownership of these CDs in roughly the same way that I’m currently craving Thornton’s Champagne Truffles now that I’ve given up caffeine again (although that’s another story).
I certainly don’t think that an mp3 is in any way a satisfactory replacement for the CD. For a start, you can’t look at the pretty pictures in the booklet. Secondly, the sound of an mp3 can sometimes be, well, shit. Thirdly, I like the idea that my purchase in some small way contributes to the hedonistic lifestyle of some band through whom I can live vicariously, although I suspect that you can’t buy much coke with 7p.
But finally, this whole burning a CD of your mp3s thing is utterly over-hyped. The CDs fail to burn properly resulting in the wasting of many blanks. Some mp3s that played perfectly well on your computer turn out to be so full of pops and clicks when you play them on your stereo that they become unlistenable (and result in the throwing away of yet another CD). And the mp3s that aren’t poppy or clicky sound like they’ve been recorded under a duvet.
Nah, mp3s will never kill off CDs. That’s the job of the money-grabbing capitalist pig record labels who pass off piles of grossly over-priced shite as ‘product’ and hope that the record-buying public is too stupid to notice.
Oh, btw, I did get some work done. Eventually.

1. Your morning routine is:
- get up
- turn computer on
- check and reply to emails
- check and reply to messageboards
- shower
- breakfast
In that order.
2. The numbers 24/7 fill you with a suffusion of joy, and yet the nearest all-night garage is miles away.
3. Your neighbours, whom you’ve only met twice in three years, worry that you’re not getting out enough.
4. You work for an internet start-up which entails working long hours, mainly online. When you get any spare time at all, you spend it… online.
5. Your biggest fear about flying to San Francisco is how on earth you’re going to cope without the internet for 14 hours.
6. The fact that they have 18mbps broadband in Japan seems like a perfectly adequate reason for moving there.
7. You have become adept at calculating time differences and know instantly exactly what time of day it is in any part of the world. The figures -8 and +9.5 are particularly important to you.
8. What used to be ‘TV dinners’ have now become ‘internet dinners’, and you only cook dishes that can be eaten with a fork alone, because that leaves you one hand free to type.
9. You regularly *emote* in your hand-written letters.
10. You have a list of Ten Signs That Your Internet Dependency Is Getting Out Of Hand, all of which apply directly to you.
Right… I’m off for some cold turkey. Anyone coming?

I always knew that there was a strong risk of this blog becoming somewhat, er, circular, but I never imagined that it would happen this soon after revealing the presence of said blog to my web compatriots.
It happens like this… you discuss something on your blog. Then you discuss the same thing with someone who’s read your blog. They then quote your own posts back at you for their own entertainment. You then threaten them with publishing their comments on your comments on your blog which they can then quote back at you the next time you see them online… And so the decline into online mental unhealth proceeds.
I must admit, I toyed with the idea of a ‘what Neil said’ thread, but ultimately, MSN conversations are never the same when you read them back the next day. So you’re saved. Say thank you and pray it doesn’t happen again.
Anyway, other thoughts percolating through my grey matter today: Why won’t Blogger play happily with NTL? I have all this new web space to fill full of shite, and Blogger refuses to publish my blog to my NTL home page. I spent hours on Thursday going through every permutation of Blogger setting possible, but no dice. Instead I ended up watching Buffy trying to save Spike, again. Why she didn’t stake him first time round I’ll never know. I mean, he deserves it even if only for that godawful chipperfuckingcockney accent.
Why can’t American actors (on the whole) do British accents? This has bugged me ever since I was first terrified by the inane utterings of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins (Gawd bless ‘er) when I was nowt but a wee sproglet. Why do they think that if they drop a few haytches and convert a few ths to fs, they’ll sound like a Luhndaner?
At least James Marsters’ accent has improved over the seasons, but he really has no excuse considering that there’s a real Brit on set that could (one presumes) give him a few pointers. Or maybe Anthony Stewart ‘Oh would you like to come in for a coffee’ Head was too busy pissing himself laughing to be able to get a word out.
Finally, I learnt a new word last night. Scriking. Apparently, it means ‘crying’. I look forward to being able to work that into conversation very soon.

I don’t much like war. And I don’t much like war flicks. I’m particularly unfond of that kind of stressed, nervy feeling I get when I watch violent flicks, so I was a little apprehensive about watching Ride with the Devil. It was recommended to me by a couple of friends, and it does feature the inimitable Tobey Maguire, and as I’m busy at the moment exploring his back catalogue I thought what the hell, I’ll give it a go, see what gives.
And what does give? Well… For much of the film I was curled up foetus-like in my chair, not really sure if I was enjoying myself or not. There’s shooting. There’s death. There’s a really grim scene where a guy gets shot through the cheeks and later on, when he takes a swig of liquor he kinda coughs and it spurts out the bullet hole. I’m cringing just thinking of it.
But in the end, this isn’t really a film about war, although the American Civil War features prominently. It’s not really about the Bushwhackers and the Jayhawkers. It’s also not really about two southern childhood friends who join up as horsemen to fight the Northern Unionists.
It’s about the slow dawning of realisation that what you thought was a noble cause was in fact a savage one, and that loyalty to your childhood friends and adherence to what you thought were your principles is in fact a betrayal of your true self. And that, like it or not, good can happen to you no matter how fast you try to run from it.
This is a majestic film. It draws you in, no matter how hard you try not to become involved (for surely sticky ends are going to be met, and I’m not a fan of sticky ends). Maguire is, as usual sublime. I keep using this word when I talk about his acting, but really it’s not so much the superlative adjective when used to describe Maguire, in fact, it barely does him justice. His presence on screen is astoundingly intense, it’s awe-inspiring. He carries the story in his eyes, where other actors rely on their lines.
But my admiration for Maguire aside, this is a great film. The scenery is beautiful, the script captivating, the story brutally absorbing. War isn’t portrayed here as organised – this is an ad hoc band of men fighting for as many reasons as there are bullets. Some, like Jake Roedel (Maguire), fight because they feel it is their duty, some fight because they simply like killing, some like Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) because they feel they have no choice. But with the bloody sacking of the Kansas town of Lawrence, both Roedel and Holt are forced to confront the fact that what they thought they were fighting for is nothing more than a mirage – they are instead fighting for men and principles they despise.
In Holt’s case, as a black slave whose bond was paid by his friend George, it’s the realisation that only George’s death can bring him true freedom. With George alive the debt of gratitude is as much a tie as slavery was – the only reason he’s not scalped along with the other blacks that the Bushwhackers come across is because he is ‘George’s nigger’. In order to pay back his debt of gratitude he must fight by George’s side even though he’s fighting for people who would gladly kill him themselves, let alone watch him die.
For Roedel, on the other hand, it’s a longer journey. He slowly comes to realise that what he is fighting for is not his way of life, nor is it to prove that he is a ‘true’ southerner. Always branded a ‘Dutchie’, Roedel can never truly become a Bushwhacker – his father and all the other ‘Dutchies’ are Unionists and that fact will always put Roedel on the defensive. This is especially true after he takes pity on a Unionist captive, arranging for him to be released in order to attempt to organise an exchange of prisoners. Instead the Unionist rides straight to Roedel’s Unionist father’s house and brutally murders him as revenge for his son’s political betrayal. Roedel is made aware later on that he was, in fact, responsible for his own father’s death. (Peter Parker, anyone?).
That kinda of reassessment of values in the face of tragedy is a theme that runs through Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm as well, which also features Maguire and about which also I feel simultaneously drawn in and shut out.
Part of the reason I felt slightly barred from full emotional participation in Ride with the Devil was, I have to admit, that I couldn’t entirely understand every word uttered by Maguire and his cohorts. You don’t get too many strong southern drawls in Reading and occasionally I just couldn’t understand what they were saying. Partly this is cos I don’t have a DVD player, so it’s all done with mirrors and cunning artifice (i.e. my computer and slightly crappy speakers).
That aside, I’ll be watching Ride with the Devil again. And the Ice Storm. If nothing else, I want to more understand these films – there’s enough character motivation and development in there to keep me analysing for months to come. And that is my favourite hobby right now, after all.
Oh, and in case you're wondering why number five – this is the fifth Maguire film I've seen in the last three weeks.